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FREDERICK NEUHOUSER
Rousseau’s Critique of
Economic Inequality
My aim in this article is to reconstruct Rousseau’s philosophical position
regarding the legitimacy of social inequality, especially economic
inequality, in a way that reveals its relevance to contemporary discussions of inequality. I focus on his view as presented in the Discourse on
the Origin of Inequality (the Second Discourse), but his full position
cannot be understood without bringing in ideas from The Social Contract. I emphasize that I am interested in Rousseau’s philosophical position because I believe both that he has a coherent position worthy of our
attention and that the philosophical significance of the Discourse has
been only vaguely understood by the many interpreters who have
written about it. I argue that although Rousseau’s position is robustly
egalitarian in the sense that it places severe limits on permissible
inequalities in wealth, he values economic equality exclusively instrumentally, as a means for promoting citizens’ freedom and for securing
the social conditions that make satisfactory recognition, an essential
component of human well-being, available to all.
In previous work,1 I reconstructed Rousseau’s view concerning
the origin of inequality—one of the two questions the Discourse
announces as its principal concern. Although his answer to this question is complex, its core idea is that inequality is pervasive in human
societies because a specific form of self-love—amour propre, the desire
to acquire a recognized standing for others—plays a fundamental role
in human motivation and because this passion easily turns into a
desire to be recognized as superior to others, providing us with a
I thank Niko Kolodny, Samuel Scheffler, and anonymous referees of this journal for
thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.
1. Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), chaps. 1–4.
© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Philosophy & Public Affairs 41, no. 3
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motivation to seek out relations of inequality. In this article, I address
the Second Discourse’s normative project, as announced in the second
of its two main questions: “is inequality authorized by natural law?”
The question I examine is: “when and why are social inequalities illegitimate?”; and answering it involves articulating what is objectionable
about social inequalities (when they are illegitimate) and understanding the limits within which social inequalities must be kept if they are
not to become objectionable.
Rousseau begins the Second Discourse by distinguishing two types
of inequality: natural and moral inequality. The former includes “differences of age, health, or bodily strength,” while the latter consists in
“different privileges some enjoy to the prejudice of others, such as
being wealthier, more highly honored, more powerful, or even getting
oneself obeyed” (DI, 131/OC 3, 131).2 One point of making this distinction is to emphasize that moral inequalities are “artificial,” which is to
say, they are created and sustained by us, and for this reason we are
responsible for them in a way we are not responsible for the inequalities created by nature.3 Moral inequalities are, as Rousseau puts it,
“established, or at least authorized” by a kind of convention that rests
ultimately on human consent (DI, 131/OC 3, 131). The talk of consent as
the foundation of moral inequalities is potentially misleading because
Rousseau does not mean that we explicitly agree to social arrangements that further inequality nor that our consent, whatever it consists
2. I cite Rousseau parenthetically in the text, using the following abbreviations: DI:
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, in The Discourses, and
Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), pp. 111–222; SC: The Social Contract, in The Social Contract, and Other Later
Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
pp. 39–152 (“SC, II.11.ii” refers to book 2, chapter 11, paragraph 2); PE: Discourse on Political
Economy, in The Discourses, and Other Early Political Writings, pp. 3–38; OC 3: Oeuvres
Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–69).
3. More precisely, moral inequalities can be just or unjust for Rousseau, whereas
natural inequalities by themselves cannot. This implies that it is not unjust that some
humans are born without sight, whereas it can be unjust that we are born into distinct
economic classes. Since many of the consequences of natural inequalities depend, however,
on social arrangements that are up to us, it is possible for those consequences to be just or
unjust (and therefore possible for us to have a duty to change them). Nature dictates,
without injustice, that certain individuals cannot see, but it does not dictate that blindness
should translate into an inability to ride public transportation.
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in, genuinely legitimizes those arrangements. Instead, his claim is that
moral inequalities are embedded in practices whose existence depends
on their participants’ beliefs in the legitimacy of those practices, and
this is why they are “moral”: practices and institutions that sustain
social inequalities are maintained for the most part not by force—or
not by force alone—but by a (tacit or explicit) consensus that they are
justified. Since Rousseau’s normative treatment of inequality is concerned only with moral—or, as I’ll call them, social—inequalities, they
are the only ones I treat here. Moreover, I focus on only one of the
social inequalities Rousseau is concerned with: economic inequality
(inequality in wealth).
From the Discourse alone it is possible to gain the impression that
simply viewing social inequalities as artificial settles the normative
question for Rousseau. This impression is reinforced by the Discourse’s
concluding paragraph, which seems to claim that social inequalities are
legitimate only when they are “directly proportional to [natural]
inequality” (DI, 188/OC 3, 193–94). As illustrations of this principle,
Rousseau offers the feeble prescriptions that the young ought not to
command the old and that imbeciles ought not to lead the wise, but it
is important to see that he has more resources than this to answer the
question of when social inequalities are illegitimate. Rousseau may
believe that natural law authorizes only inequalities grounded in
natural advantages, but he does not believe that only nature-based
inequalities can be legitimate. For, as The Social Contract makes clear,
there is a source of legitimacy other than nature, namely, the “convention” (or agreement), in which right in society is grounded. That
Rousseau is committed to the legitimacy of certain inequalities not
directly due to natural inequality becomes clear in The Social Contract.
In saying, for example, that the state’s goal should be to bring the
extremes of rich and poor “as close together as possible,” Rousseau
acknowledges that absolute equality in “power and riches” is too severe
a demand (SC, II.11.ii). Thus, the mere artificiality of inequality does not
imply that it is unjustified; its artificiality merely means that it is appropriate for normative questions regarding its legitimacy to be raised. As I
argue below, Rousseau’s answers to these normative questions follow
from his vision of what must be shown about social arrangements in
general in order to establish their legitimacy, a vision that looks beyond
nature—to freedom—for its normative criteria.
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I. ETHICAL DANGERS OF INEQUALITY: DOMINATION AND “UNHAPPINESS”
The first step in reconstructing Rousseau’s position involves understanding why economic inequality is ethically dangerous—why, when
viewed from the perspective of what is good for human beings, economic inequality is something we should worry about. Explaining this is
a central task of the Second Discourse, and it offers a relatively clear
answer to this question: “as soon as . . . equality disappeared, . . . slavery
and misery . . . germinated and grew” (DI, 167/OC 3, 171; emphasis
added).4 These two effects of social inequality correspond nicely to the
features of the original state of nature and of the “Golden Age” that
Rousseau points to earlier in the text when explaining why those conditions are good: what makes the latter “the best state for human beings” is
that in it individuals are “free, healthy, good, and happy” (DI, 167/OC 3,
171). What these passages suggest is that we should be disturbed by economic inequality because of its tendency to produce two evils: unhappiness and the loss of freedom.
I begin with the connection between inequality and freedom, which is
both the more important and the easier to understand. There are two
parts to the claim that economic inequality endangers freedom, both of
which are prominent themes throughout the Second Discourse. The first
concerns the freedom-threatening character of human dependence in
general, where dependence consists in relying on the cooperation of
others in order to get one’s needs (or what one takes one’s needs to be)
satisfied. Rousseau expresses this part of his view in saying: “since ties of
servitude are formed solely by the mutual dependence of men and the
reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to subjugate a man
without first having placed him in the position of being unable to do
without another” (DI, 159/OC 3, 162). The thought here is simple. One of
the Discourse’s fundamental ideas is that all forms of human dependence carry with them the danger that dependent individuals will have
to compromise their freedom in order to satisfy the needs that impel
them to cooperate with others. If freedom consists in “obeying only
oneself” (SC, I.6.iv), then dependence poses a standing threat to being
free, since it opens up the possibility that in order to get what I need,
4. “Misery” does not mean only poverty but the “suffering of body or soul” (DI,
150/OC 3, 152).
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I may have little choice but to tailor my actions to conform to the wills of
those on whose cooperation I rely. When regularly faced with a choice
between getting what I need and following my own will, it will be no
surprise if satisfying my needs often wins out over remaining free.
The threat that dependence poses to freedom is greatly exacerbated
when economic inequality, the second element of Rousseau’s account,
is brought into the picture. Here, too, the idea is simple: it is much less
likely that dependence will translate into a loss of freedom for some if
interdependent beings encounter one another on an equal footing than
if, from the start, one side has an advantage over the other with respect
to wealth or power. This is the basis for Rousseau’s advice in The Social
Contract that “as for wealth, no citizen should be so rich that he can buy
another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself” (SC,
II.11.ii). Economic inequality becomes dangerous, in other words, when
it threatens the ability of the less advantaged to follow their own wills
rather than those of the better off. Distinguishing these two elements of
Rousseau’s account of the problem—dependence and inequality—enables us to see more clearly the strategy of his response to it: since
dependence is fundamental to human existence (and since abolishing it
would do away with most of what makes our lives recognizably human),
good social institutions seek not to eliminate dependence but to
restructure it, which means placing limits on what can be reduced
without harming essential human interests, most notably, substantial
disparities in wealth.
It is important to see that Rousseau has something very specific in
mind when he speaks of the loss of freedom. Several conceptions of
freedom play a role in Rousseau’s thought, but the one at issue here is
the absence of domination, the essence of which is “obeying only
oneself,” as opposed to obeying the wills of others. This conception of
domination—emphasizing obedience—is a forerunner of what Max
Weber later calls Herrschaft, “the likelihood of finding obedience to one’s
commands in others.”5 Weber’s definition is very close to how Rousseau
characterizes domination in the Second Discourse, namely, as (regularly) “succeeding in getting oneself obeyed” (DI, 158/OC 3, 161), where it
is assumed that obedience is asymmetric, proceeding in one direction
5. Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987), 1:53; translation amended.
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only. At the same time, there is an important difference between these
two conceptions: whereas Herrschaft for Weber can be legitimate (some
forms of one-sided obedience are justified), anything that Rousseau calls
domination counts as an absence of freedom and warrants critique.
Since Rousseau, too, believes that some forms of one-sided obedience—
children obeying parents or citizens obeying legitimate law—are compatible with freedom (and therefore not domination), his definition of
domination merely in terms of “success in getting oneself obeyed” must
be modified to reflect this fact. It is tempting to deal with this problem as
many republican theorists do, by distinguishing the arbitrary wills of
others from those that “track the interests and ideas” of those who obey.6
Yet this is not how Rousseau characterizes domination, and examining
why he does not reveals significant differences between him and much
of the republican tradition.
Traditional republican definitions of freedom as nondomination, in
contrast to Rousseau’s, typically do not refer to obedience at all. Instead
they define domination in terms of the dominator’s ability to “interfere
on an arbitrary basis with the choices of the dominated,” where “arbitrary” signifies that the interferer “is not forced to track the interests and
ideas of those who suffer the interference.”7 The absence of obedience
from this definition (interference is a broader phenomenon than finding
obedience in the wills of others), together with its emphasis on someone’s being subject to arbitrary power, points to a significant difference
between the two conceptions: for Rousseau, the core of domination
resides not in being interfered with in ways that are contrary to one’s
interests but in obeying a foreign will, or failing to be the master of one’s
own will (in the sense of allowing someone else’s commands to determine what one does). This means that for him, the ideal to which domination is opposed is determining for oneself 8 how one acts rather than, as
traditional republicans would have it, acting—including being compelled or commanded to act—in ways that promote my interests (as I
understand them), regardless of whether it is I or someone else who
determines what those acts are. For Rousseau, in other words, freedom
6. Philip Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 272.
7. Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 22, 272; emphasis added.
8. The talk of self-determination is not intended to suggest a positive conception of
freedom. “Determining for oneself” contrasts with others deciding for me; it is compatible
with acting on unreflected desires as long as they are mine rather than someone else’s.
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as nondomination is more closely connected to an ideal of free agency—
determining for oneself what to do, or obeying only oneself—than to the
ideal of having one’s interests promoted,9 where the question of who
determines what such promoting consists in is unimportant.
Does it then make no difference to Rousseau’s conception of domination whether the will that I obey directs me toward my own interests or
whether it disregards them? Is the arbitrary character of the commanding will irrelevant to domination? Although Rousseau never explicitly
poses this question, his view is best reconstructed as follows: domination
is made worse—it is intensified as domination—when the will that I
regularly obey leads me to act in ways that conflict with my own interests. Yet there is still domination even if what that will commands me to
do serves my interests: regularly obeying a will other than my own constitutes a deficiency in free agency, even when the will I obey is benign.
Getting clear on Rousseau’s view requires seeing that there are two
senses in which a commanding will can be foreign, the first of which is
essential to domination, whereas the second is neither necessary nor
sufficient (though its co-presence with the first increases the severity of
domination). The first, more straightforward sense is when the commands of the will I obey are issued by some agent other than me. This is
a question about where the commands that I follow originate: in myself
or in some other agent? But a will can also be foreign in a second sense:
with respect to its content. A will that is foreign to me in this sense is one
whose commands, regardless of who issues them, fail to direct me to act
in ways that promote my interests and are therefore arbitrary. It is the
converse of this claim—a will counts as mine (in a limited respect) when
it promotes my interests—that stands behind Rousseau’s claim that the
general will is in some sense my own will (because it promotes my
freedom and well-being), even when I do not subjectively recognize it as
such.10 And no doubt some version of this idea stands behind the claim
of traditional republicanism that nonarbitrary interference is not domination and is therefore compatible with the freedom of the agent who
suffers such interference.
9. More precisely, the ideal is invulnerability to having one’s agency interfered with in
ways that disregard one’s interests.
10. This is the idea behind Rousseau’s statement that “whoever refuses to obey the
general will shall be constrained to do so, . . . which means only that he will be forced to be
free” (SC, I.7.viii).
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For Rousseau, regularly obeying a will that is foreign in only the first
of these senses qualifies as domination (and warrants critique), but
regularly obeying a will that is foreign in both senses counts as more
intense domination than when the obeyed will fails to be foreign in the
second sense. Hence, Rousseau agrees with traditional republicans that
being subject to others’ arbitrary wills is illegitimate without agreeing
either that it is the arbitrariness of those wills that makes that obedience
domination or that domination requires arbitrariness. There is an
important respect, then, in which Rousseau’s conception of domination
is the more demanding of the two: by not making the arbitrary character of the will I obey a necessary condition of domination, it includes
much the same phenomena the traditional definition does while, in
addition, objecting to someone’s regularly obeying another will even
when that will tracks his interests.
It might be objected that focusing on obedience and de-emphasizing
arbitrariness runs the risk of confusing domination with the less objectionable phenomenon of paternalism. In fact, Rousseau’s position
enables us to define paternalism—regular, one-sided obedience of a will
that is foreign in the first sense but not in the second—in a way that
differentiates it from obedience to a will that is foreign in both senses and
explains why the latter is more objectionable than the former (it involves
obeying a will that is foreign in two senses rather than merely one).
Rousseau’s definition does not indeed distinguish paternalism (among
adults) from domination, but this is one of its virtues. Paternalism
among adults is a form of domination, and without resorting to an ad hoc
strategy of invoking some other conception of freedom, traditional
republicanism lacks the resources to criticize it as such.11
Does this imply that parents dominate their children when they
command them to do what is good for them? Clearly not. Paternalism
is precisely the form legitimate authority takes within the family, and this
is because in that sphere those who obey (children) are for natural,
11. Pettit embraces this counterintuitive implication: “intentional interferences that are
non-arbitrary are similar to natural obstacles in . . . not compromising freedom” (Pettit,
Republicanism, p. 77). To be precise, there is one form of paternalism traditional republicans can recognize as domination: when interference by others tracks my interests but not
my ideas of my interests. There is a second form of paternalism, however, that they cannot
recognize as domination, where one agent determines which specific actions are required
of another if the latter’s interests, as both agents understand them, are to be promoted.
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developmental reasons not yet their own masters. In cases involving only
adults, regularly obeying a will that is foreign in only the first sense
distinguished above counts as domination, but future agents who have
not reached the age of competency are not yet sovereign wills and therefore not yet possible victims of domination, though they can, of course,
be oppressed, wronged, or mistreated when the adult wills they obey fail
to track their own interests, including as future sovereign agents.
In a similar vein, one might ask whether, since they are adults, citizens
who are compelled to obey legitimate laws count as victims of domination. That Rousseau speaks of individuals in this situation as “forced to
be free” (SC, I.7.viii) suggests that he does not regard legitimate law as a
possible source of domination. Since legitimate law is nonarbitrary rule,
this might seem to push Rousseau right back into the camp of the traditional republicans from whom I have been attempting to distinguish him
(who take the nonarbitrary character of law as sufficient to make it
nondominating). Getting clear on why this is not the case further illuminates the differences between the two conceptions of domination,
especially with respect to the importance of something traditional
republicans do not emphasize: democratic rule.12 If the claim that legitimate law cannot dominate is to conform to the position I attributed to
Rousseau above, we must be able to explain why it does not represent a
foreign will in the first of the senses explicated here, even when citizens
do not obey it willingly. Explaining this requires taking note of the role
that the democratic form of lawmaking plays in Rousseau’s conception
of legitimate law. One way of putting the point is to say that legitimate
laws must “issue from me” (SC, II.4.v) not only with respect to their
objective content—they must promote my fundamental interests—but
also with respect to their subjective form: it must be I who determines
which specific laws direct me in ways that satisfy my interests. The question, then, is how I can determine the specific laws that govern me, given
that laws apply to all and hence, if they are to be compatible with our
freedom, must issue from every citizen as much as they do from myself.
12. Republicanism, as Pettit reconstructs it, has a tenuous relation to democracy: the
value of democracy is subordinated to other values (avoiding arbitrary interference), and
republican institutions must be democratic only in the sense that they allow for laws to be
contested (Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 183–90, 200–2). In his latest work, however, Pettit
accords more importance to democracy: see Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), chaps. 4–5.
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It is the fact that Rousseau takes this consideration very seriously that
explains his insistence that sovereignty cannot be represented (SC, II.1.ii;
III.15.v–xi). If laws—even good laws—are to avoid being a source of
domination, they must actually be made by those subject to them.
Because legislation must be a collective enterprise, I can determine the
laws that govern me only by actively participating in a democratic
process in which those laws are made. As a citizen, I determine for myself
what I am to do only insofar as I am an active member of the group that
literally makes the laws that govern all of us. Moreover, my participation
in that process must be sufficiently substantial that the claim that the
laws issue from me—from an us that incorporates me as an active
participant—is not merely a hollow slogan, even when some of the laws
that emerge from that process diverge from my opinion of what our
collective ideals and interests require us to do. This is why participatory
democracy is not a peripheral feature of Rousseau’s vision of the legitimate republic; it is, rather, essential to avoiding domination in such a
republic, and on this issue his differences from traditional republicans
could hardly be starker. Rousseau agrees with them that “law that
answers systematically to people’s . . . interests . . . does not compromise
people’s liberty,”13 but only on the further condition that those laws are,
in a robust sense, collectively issued by the very people subject to them.
A final respect in which Rousseau’s definition of domination diverges
from that of traditional republicanism is that for Rousseau, freedom
from domination is not primarily a legal status—for example, that of a
free citizen as opposed to a slave—but an empirically real condition
constituted by actual (regular and one-sided) obedience.14 Whereas both
positions agree that domination is an enduring rather than a sporadic
phenomenon, for Rousseau, one party’s regular obedience of another
counts as domination, even when that pattern of obedience is not
13. Pettit, Republicanism, p. 35.
14. Because Rousseau focuses on actual obedience rather than a dominator’s ability to
command obedience, traditional republicans might object that he has no resources to
condemn statuses that make interference possible even when no actual interference
occurs. It is true that Rousseau is committed to regarding a slave who never actually follows
a master’s command as having avoided domination, but he is no less committed than
traditional republicanism is to abolishing the statuses “slave” and “serf.” Since the political
imperative for him is to eliminate all social conditions, including legal statuses, that make
it possible for domination to arise, there is no practical difference between him and traditional republicans on this score (SC, I.4.vi).
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formally inscribed in legal or social statuses.15 This is important, especially in the modern world, because it enables political philosophers to
detect and criticize forms of domination that are not encoded in legal
statuses such as “slave” or “serf” but that arise instead out of conditions
of dependence and inequality among individuals who are legally recognized as free and equal persons.
Now that we have examined in detail what domination is for
Rousseau, we are in a better position to grasp its relevance for his critique of economic inequality. One way of revealing this relevance is to
consider the relation between domination and coercion. Domination
differs from coercion along two dimensions. First, whereas coercion can
consist in a single act of obeying, domination is an enduring condition, a
regular obeying of a foreign will. Second, and more important, what
typically compels my actual obedience of another for Rousseau is not
physical force or threatened penalties but my needing the cooperation of
someone who is in a more advantaged position than I. When I depend on
advantaged others for the satisfaction of my needs, the mere prospect
that they may do nothing—that they may refuse to cooperate because
they need my help less urgently than I do theirs—can be sufficient to
motivate me to obey their commands or cater to their desires. This suggests that the type of domination that interests Rousseau involves
obeying a foreign will in a more robust sense than when one is coerced to
obey by physical force or the threat of punishment.16 This type of domination involves willingly obeying another—in the absence of force or
15. Whereas freedom is primarily a legal status for traditional republicans (Pettit,
Republicanism, pp. 30–32, 36, 66), it is not exclusively so for Pettit. Like traditional republicans, he focuses not on actual interference but on dominators’ ability to interfere. This
makes domination an enduring condition, though not necessarily a legal one. But Pettit is
not always clear about what an ability to interfere consists in. It sometimes seems that
having a status as the citizen of a republic suffices to make one free of domination. Yet he
also notes that certain nonlegal forms of social power can give persons an ability to interfere, implying that his version of republicanism requires “radical changes in traditional
social life” and not merely constitutional guarantees against arbitrary interference
(Pettit, Republicanism, p. 47).
16. Regular obedience based on coercion counts as domination, just not the sort
Rousseau is most interested in. Perhaps this is because he thinks that few real instances of
domination can be explained exclusively in this way. To be effective, standing threats of
force usually also rely on the (false) opinions of the dominated regarding the legitimacy of
the dominator’s commands. This means that domination often depends on false consciousness and that domination can exist without the dominated knowing it.
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threats—which means that actual consent does not itself indicate the
absence of domination, a point that is brought out in Rousseau’s consideration of the specious social contract in Part II of the Second Discourse, where the property-less consent to the terms of their own
domination. When one is dominated in the way the Second Discourse is
most concerned with, one is motivated to obey others not by force or
threats but by the prospect of finding one’s needs unsatisfied. Although
this makes it difficult sometimes to determine precisely where free cooperation ends and domination begins, there can be no doubt that domination exists and is common in the societies we live in. It is the very
phenomenon Adam Smith points to in The Wealth of Nations when he
notes that because workers need to eat more urgently than their masters
need to make a profit, wage disputes in capitalism are almost always
decided in favor of the latter.17 Because of their disadvantaged position in
relation to those with whom they stand in relations of dependence,
workers typically end up laboring under conditions dictated by their
bosses, a prime example of obeying a foreign will.
I turn now to a second reason the Second Discourse provides for
worrying about economic inequality: the obstacles it poses to human
happiness—or, more precisely, its tendency to promote unhappiness,
defined as a regular or systematic frustration of persons’ desires.18 The
connection Rousseau draws between inequality and unhappiness is
more complex than the corresponding point regarding freedom. The
relevant claim is not that being poor makes one unhappy since it means
that many of the poor’s desires will be unsatisfied. This is certainly true;
however, the object of Rousseau’s critique is not poverty but inequality,
and the two ideas must be kept separate by bearing in mind that it is
possible to be on the lower end of an unequal distribution of wealth
without being poor (in the sense of having basic needs unmet or falling
short of the minimal standards for a decent life). Rousseau’s idea, rather,
is that substantial disparities in wealth make it difficult for social
members to satisfy one specific, fundamental longing that plays a major
role in human happiness, the desire, derived from amour propre, to
17. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 169.
18. The ideals realized in the original state of nature are best characterized in terms of
the absence of the evils civilization brings with it: freedom is the absence of domination,
and happiness is the absence of frustrated desires.
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achieve a recognized standing for others. One problem is that in societies
marked by inequalities in wealth, especially societies whose public
culture regards wealth as an indicator of status or worth, being at the
bottom of the economic scale is commonly experienced as humiliating,
making it difficult for the recognitive desires of the worse off to be satisfied. Even if we grant the argument of anti-egalitarians that the largest
part of what is humiliating in such a situation is being poor (being unable
to lead a humanly decent life in which basic needs are met) rather than
being worse off than others, it remains plausible that, even where no one
is poor, substantial inequalities in wealth translate into corresponding
inequalities in social recognition that pose significant hindrances to all
satisfying their desire for recognized standing.
Yet the most interesting way in which Rousseau takes economic
inequality to foster unhappiness is more complex than this. The main
claim of the Second Discourse is that societies with substantial economic inequality tend to produce in individuals inflamed desires
for recognition, desires that make the society-wide satisfaction of
amour propre impossible and, so, guarantee frustration and conflict.
Rousseau’s understanding of what counts as inflamed amour propre is
complex,19 but for present purposes it is sufficient to focus on one of its
most prominent manifestations, the desire to have a recognized standing as superior to others. The social problems produced by desires for
superiority are legion and, especially since Hobbes, familiar. One is that
when success is defined as achieving superiority, the universal satisfaction of amour propre becomes impossible: when everyone seeks superior status, recognition becomes a scarce good, and rather than being
available to all, it becomes the object of endless competition, conflict,
and frustrated desires. A second difficulty is “keeping up with the
Joneses.” This problem is due to the fact that superior standing, once
attained, tends to be insecure as long as it is achieved in relation to
others who desire the same. In order to outdo the competitor who has
just surpassed me, or to maintain the preeminence I now enjoy, I must
constantly be engaged in enhancing my own current standing. But in
such a situation, individuals are burdened with a limitless need to better
their own positions in response to, or in anticipation of, their rivals’
advances, resulting in an unceasing game of one-upmanship. The
19. See Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love, chap. 3.
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problem here is not merely that the only satisfaction amour propre can
find will be fleeting and insecure but also that desires become boundless
in a way that is inimical to genuine happiness.
Rousseau’s main claim concerning the connection between economic inequality and unhappiness is based on the view that the economic features of a society affect the consequences amour propre will
have in it by structuring the field of possibilities within which social
recognition can be pursued: how individuals seek to satisfy their amour
propre depends on the opportunities for recognition their society
permits and encourages, and the economic sphere plays a major role in
defining these opportunities. A society that limits disparities in wealth
generates different recognitive aspirations in its members from one
whose economic system feeds on and celebrates the desire to be “filthy
rich.” Social institutions, in other words, shape the desires of their
members, and substantial economic inequalities have the potential to
produce in them aspirations that ultimately cannot be satisfied for all.
The relation economic inequality has to unhappiness is weaker than
its relation to domination, but the connection—and the danger it
poses—is real nonetheless. As I have described this relation, economic
inequality is a source of unhappiness only on the assumption that a
society’s culture is such that wealth is imbued with recognitive significance and functions as a marker of status. This, however, seems to be an
unproblematic assumption: while it may be possible to imagine human
societies where this is not the case, they would surely be exceptions to
the general trend. A more interesting qualification of Rousseau’s claim is
that not all societies in which differences in wealth are linked to differences in status need generate desires for superior standing in their
members. Societies with rigid class or caste hierarchies may foreclose
the possibility of economic advancement to such an extent that most
individuals never develop a desire to enhance their standing by acquiring wealth and hence would not be frustrated by their failure to do so.
Of course, solving the problem of inflamed desires for recognition by
introducing a fixed hierarchy of classes stands in great tension with
Rousseau’s commitment to avoiding arbitrary distinctions in basic social
or political status; in modern societies informed by such a commitment,
where the pursuit of wealth must be open to all, the connection between
economic inequality and the generation of inflamed desires for recognition is, if not perfectly tight, more than accidental.
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II. CRITERIA FOR LEGITIMATE INEQUALITY
This concludes my account of the two dangers of economic inequality,
and it puts us in a position to reconstruct Rousseau’s answer to the more
specific question of the extent to which economic inequality is illegitimate, or impermissible. In short, his view is that economic inequality is
permissible when, and only when, it is does not threaten the fundamental interests of any citizen—in freedom and the basic social conditions of
well-being—that it is the task of the legitimate republic to safeguard. In
this section, I elaborate on this principle in order to make Rousseau’s
criteria for legitimate inequality as specific as possible. Once I have
sketched the general principle of political legitimacy that follows from
Rousseau’s account of the basic terms of the social contract, I discuss,
first, the constraints on inequality that derive from the consequences it
has for the freedom of citizens and, second, the constraints deriving from
the threat inequality poses to well-being. Both sets of constraints reinforce a point already implicit in my discussion of the ethical dangers of
inequality, namely, that Rousseau’s evaluation of economic inequality
has a significant consequentialist20 strand: to the extent that economic
inequality is objectionable, it is because of its objectionable consequences, not because it is somehow wrong “in itself.”
The principle governing Rousseau’s position on the limits of permissible inequality follows from his general account of the conditions of
political legitimacy as articulated in The Social Contract. There Rousseau
defines the legitimate state as one that allows for the fundamental interests of all citizens to be satisfied. What those interests are can be read off
his formulation of the problem the social contract is supposed to solve:
“Find a form of association that defends and protects the person and
goods of each associate with all the common force, and by means of
which each, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and
remains as free as before” (SC, I.6.iv). As I interpret this statement,
Rousseau ascribes two kinds of fundamental interests to human beings,
corresponding to the two main dangers of social inequality depicted in
20. One way of formulating this consequentialist element is to say that freedom (the
absence of domination) is an end institutions “seek to promote, not a constraint that they
have to honor in pursuit of other goals” (Pettit, Republicanism, p. 81). Below I distinguish
Rousseau’s position from full-blown consequentialism as usually understood.
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the Second Discourse: the first comprises interests in well-being—
closely related to what the Discourse calls happiness—which include
interests in the preservation of life, personal security, and certain
unspecified goods essential to human well-being (PE, 23/OC 3, 262); the
second is an interest in freedom, defined as “obeying only oneself.”
Rousseau’s statement of the problem the social contract is to solve
makes it clear that legitimate laws aim at realizing the freedom and
promoting the social conditions of well-being for each citizen and that
in doing so they accord equal weight to the fundamental interests of
each. This means that despite its focus on the consequences of economic inequality, Rousseau’s position is not consequentialist in the
sense of seeking to maximize the sum total of the goods it seeks to
promote regardless of how those goods are distributed. This is especially clear in the case of freedom: although some sense might be made
of the idea of maximizing overall freedom—or, more intuitively, minimizing overall domination—Rousseau’s consistent emphasis on the
interests of each clearly implies that, starting from a presumption of
equal freedom, laws and institutions may not be designed to achieve
lower overall domination at the cost of increasing the domination suffered by any individual or group.21 Moreover, given that domination
consists in regular asymmetries of obedience rather than merely sporadic instances of it, it is unlikely that Rousseau could accept any level
of domination. For this reason, even talk of equalizing freedom is
potentially misleading: legitimate laws seek not to equalize but to eliminate domination (for all).
That Rousseau condemns economic inequality because of its consequences is made clear in his discussion of the constraints that considerations of freedom place on inequality, especially in his well-known claim
that the general will has two principal aims—freedom and equality—and
that equality (in wealth and power) is such an aim because “freedom
cannot subsist without it” (SC, II.11.i.). Here Rousseau states unambiguously that we should seek economic equality because (and only when)
it threatens social members’ freedom. With regard to citizens’ interest
21. Rousseau treats both individuals and groups as possible victims of domination. But
group domination always involves the domination of individuals: it makes sense to say that
“the rich” dominate “the poor,” but this implies that poor individuals, by virtue of their
membership in a group, suffer domination.
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in being free, Rousseau’s criterion for the legitimacy of economic
inequality can be formulated as follows: disparities in wealth are permissible only when they do not pose systematic obstacles to the freedom of
any individual, especially to the freedom of the less well off;22 economic
inequality is permissible only to the extent that it is compatible with the
absence of relations of domination among social members. Clearly, this
formulation of the criterion leaves many questions unanswered about
how it is to be applied to yield judgments about specific laws and institutions. I have already mentioned that, because it is compatible with the
actual consent of the dominated, domination is sometimes difficult to
distinguish from genuine cooperation. But there are other problems as
well: does the principle apply to all forms of domination, or are there
instances of domination that, because they belong to a private domain
mostly unaffected by social and political conditions, are not subject to
the principle? And for forms of domination that are the proper object of
the state’s concern, how does one determine the “tipping point” at
which economic inequality goes from being benign to posing substantial
obstacles to the freedom of the worse off? Despite these unanswered
questions, Rousseau’s principle does provide an orientation for thinking
about the limits of permissible economic inequality; it directs us to ask:
which types and degrees of economic inequality are compatible with the
basic social conditions individuals need in order to be able to satisfy their
needs while avoiding regular obedience to foreign wills?
Returning to Smith’s example of domination may be instructive here.
In this case, Rousseau’s principle might be interpreted as ruling out the
very divisions in economic class that Smith’s example relies on—where
the freedom of some is threatened by a basic inequality reflected in the
circumstance that some own only their own labor power, while others
own the means of production, access to which everyone needs in order
to live. Alternatively, the principle might be interpreted as justifying a set
of institutions—strong labor unions with aggressive laws protecting the
bargaining rights of workers, for example—that mitigate the freedomendangering potential of class distinctions while leaving that fundamental inequality in place. I have suggested that, even if Rousseau’s principle
22. This coheres with what Elizabeth Anderson calls “democratic equality,” which
“guarantees all . . . citizens effective access to the social conditions of their freedom”:
Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (1999): 289.
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does not yield a fully determinate picture of the laws and institutions a
free society should aim at, it succeeds in defining a major problem to be
addressed and in providing a basic orientation for thinking about the
forms of economic inequality that must be avoided if the social contract’s ideal of freedom for all is to be realized. Apart from this, though,
much of the tone of the Second Discourse—its pessimistic view of the
“crimes, wars, . . . miseries, and horrors” that unequal private property
(in land) brings in its wake (DI, 161/OC 3, 164)—expresses a general preference for one of two strategies for responding to the freedomendangering potential of inequality. The more radical of these strategies
involves reforming society from the bottom up in order to eliminate the
fundamental causes of inequality (in this case, by eradicating class differences), while the other accepts those basic inequalities but seeks to
correct for their freedom-endangering potential through measures that
balance out the power disparities among parties, perhaps by strengthening workers’ ability to bargain collectively or by instituting laws requiring that workers have equal say in matters that concern them.23 Whatever
such corrective measures consist in, they will most likely rely on political
efforts aimed at mitigating the effects of underlying economic inequalities. The part of Rousseau’s view that pushes him to prefer the former
strategy—one of several respects in which his position anticipates
Marx’s—is a fundamental pessimism about the power of purely political
measures to correct imbalances residing in a society’s economic structure. The specious social contract, which institutionalizes asymmetries
in power rooted in economic inequality, seems to him a virtually
unavoidable consequence of that basic inequality (DI, 172–73/OC 3,
176–78). Once citizens’ particular interests are as deeply opposed and
entrenched as they are in societies divided into propertied and
nonpropertied classes, the former will nearly always find ways to circumvent whatever laws attempt to reduce their power to command the latter.
As Marx was to argue in “On the Jewish Question,” the aims of politics
cannot be much out of line with the pattern of interests in the economic
sphere if the former is to remedy the problems generated by the latter:
a harmony of interests “at the top” (in politics) requires some basis for
that harmony “below” (in the economy).
23. Pettit distinguishes the same two strategies but unlike Rousseau embraces the
second (Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 67, 85).
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It is worth asking whether the arguments presented here really tell
against relative deficiencies in wealth as opposed to absolute conditions
of privation: is what threatens universal freedom having less than others
or being poor? The answer to this question is probably both, since under
the right circumstances either can increase the likelihood of domination.
It might be thought that Rousseau’s arguments imply that being poor is
the true threat to avoiding domination since the connection between
inequality and the likelihood of domination relies on the claim that
dependence—the lack of self-sufficiency with respect to satisfying
needs—is what motivates individuals to obey the wills of others. If people’s basic needs are met, so the objection goes, inequalities in wealth
will be unproblematic because no one will be compelled by need to obey
others, and in the absence of that incentive no one, or very few, will be
inclined to do so. This would imply that if the worse off ceased to be poor
(in absolute terms), their being worse off than others, even considerably
worse off, would no longer pose a substantial obstacle to their freedom.
(Of course, even if this objection were correct, Rousseau’s arguments
would reveal an often overlooked evil of poverty under conditions of
inequality: beyond merely having one’s needs unmet, being poor makes
one vulnerable to domination by the nonpoor.)
This objection gets something right: being both poor and worse off
than others poses a greater danger to one’s freedom than merely having
less than others. Yet, even so, Rousseau’s principle is justified in singling
out inequality as the threat to freedom. One reason is that absolute
deprivation is not itself sufficient to generate domination (whereas, as I
argue below, inequality can generate domination in the absence of absolute deprivation). This is because equal absolute deprivation, though
bad for other reasons, creates no basis for asymmetries in patterns of
obedience to arise. Since domination, like all “moral” inequalities, is
a relative phenomenon—a privilege “some enjoy to the prejudice of
others” (DI, 131/OC 3, 131)—its source must be relative as well: economic
inequality and not merely neediness absolutely defined.
A second reason Rousseau is correct to highlight inequality is that, as
many defenders of egalitarianism have pointed out, our conceptions of
our basic needs, or of what is necessary to live a decent life, evolve in
response to social and cultural developments. If, as seems likely, these
historical variables include the overall wealth of a society, as well as how
well off various groups within that society are, it is doubtful that, except
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in very extreme cases, poverty is ever defined wholly in absolute terms.
(One widely used measure of poverty, that of the OECD, defines the poor
relatively, as those whose income falls below 60 percent of society’s
median income.) If our conception of what it is to live a minimally decent
life depends in part on how much social wealth there is generally, or on
how well off other groups in society are, then inequality, and not merely
some absolutely conceived standard of poverty, is a justified target of
Rousseau’s principle. Another way of putting this is to say that, except for
societies with very primitive levels of development, the concept of need
(and hence of poverty) is itself a relative notion, and relative not only to
existing technology but also to how much wealth others in the same
society have. Alternatively, one could say that considerations of amour
propre (of what appropriately reflects the dignity of human beings) enter
into our conception of what individuals in a given society must have
available to them in order to live a decent human life. One implication of
this is that even when public policy declares poverty its enemy, it is often,
though perhaps unwittingly, targeting inequality as well.24 Rousseau’s
point, however, is not that reducing inequality is good because it reduces
poverty but rather that we have an important reason to reduce inequality
beyond our usual reasons for condemning poverty, namely, because
inequality generates domination.
Rousseau’s claim that poverty is less important than inequality in
generating domination is reinforced by the fact that the needs invoked in
explaining the connections among dependence, inequality, and domination do not have to be “true” but only perceived needs, since the latter,
too, provide dependent individuals with an incentive to obey others
in order to secure their cooperation: the danger of domination arises
whenever the worse off perceive themselves as needing something that
24. Another implication of the relative character of poverty is that it is theoretically
possible to reduce poverty by reducing inequality without improving the absolute lot of the
worst off; even more paradoxically, it is sometimes possible to reduce poverty by reducing
inequality even when doing so makes the least advantaged worse off in absolute terms.
Rawls’s difference principle could tolerate the first measure but not the second. Rousseau’s
position could justify both but only for the purpose of reducing domination. Because
Rousseau gives us grounds for endorsing the second scenario under certain
circumstances—when making the worst off worse off in absolute terms is necessary to
avoiding their domination—he gives us a reason the difference principle cannot for sometimes preferring equality over maximizing the position of the worst off. This reflects the
priority for him of freedom over well-being.
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cooperation with the better off could give them. And since the judgments
of amour propre—judgments of what we need in order to secure a recognized status—are the most important factor in turning desires into
perceived needs, inequalities can be expected to increase dependence
(by increasing what we think we need in order to have our sense of self
confirmed by others), which, under the conditions of that inequality,
easily translates into relations of domination: in order to acquire what
we take to be necessary to count publicly as someone, we are more likely
to be tempted to follow the wills of more favorably situated individuals
whose cooperation—perhaps their thinking well of us—enables us
to do so.
As I have suggested, Rousseau’s view that disparities in wealth
threaten not only the freedom of social members but also their happiness suggests a second criterion for legitimate economic inequality:
inequality is impermissible to the extent that it engenders in social
members inflamed desires for recognition that make the universal satisfaction of amour propre impossible. Articulating this claim requires
saying more about the relation between what the Second Discourse calls
happiness and what I am calling citizens’ fundamental interest in wellbeing. Happiness, it should be clear, is too broad a concept to appear in
the formulation of the social contract’s basic task, for two reasons. First,
if happiness is relevant to the basic aims of political society, it cannot be
that a legitimate state must secure the actual happiness of its members.
Since individual happiness depends on many factors beyond those
states or societies can be held responsible for, making the actual happiness of all a condition of political legitimacy would be too demanding.
At most, the state might be charged with ensuring that the basic social
conditions of individuals’ happiness obtain, conditions that make
happiness, to the extent that the state is responsible for it, available in
principle to everyone.
The second problem with including happiness among the state’s aims
is that happiness, conceived of as the satisfaction of desires (or, negatively, as the absence of frustration), is defined in relation to actual
desires without attention to how important those desires are to genuine
well-being or to whether they are desires the state should make it its
business to promote. When happiness is defined merely formally—as a
correspondence between desires and one’s success in satisfying
them—it depends too much on which desires individuals happen to
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have, and, as Rousseau famously maintains, what humans actually
desire is both extremely malleable (subject to influence by society and
culture) and extremely vulnerable to corruption (to becoming desires for
things that are bad for us). This is why a plausible statement of the social
contract’s aims must refer to fundamental interests in well-being, objectively construed, rather than to happiness, even if having one’s fundamental interests in well-being satisfied is a necessary (but not sufficient)
condition of happiness. In other words, not all elements of individuals’
happiness will be of concern to the state, and of those that are it is only
the social conditions of those goods that the state can be required to
ensure. This explains why, rather than mentioning happiness in formulating the social contract’s basic task, Rousseau merely lists certain
goods that are plausible candidates for fundamental human interests,
namely, “the person and goods of each associate” (SC, I.6.iv) or “the
goods [and] life . . . of each member” (PE, 9/OC 3, 248). For reasons I
cannot go into here, I believe it is plausible to attribute to Rousseau the
view that finding satisfaction of one’s amour propre—finding satisfying
types of social recognition—counts as a fundamental interest of human
beings (an essential part of their well-being) and that some of the conditions of this satisfaction come within the purview of political philosophy because social and political institutions play a significant role in
shaping and satisfying individuals’ recognitive desires.
My suggestion, in other words, is that Rousseau’s political theory can
be read as committed to thinking about how society must be constituted
if each of its members is to be assured the basic social conditions necessary for finding a satisfying degree of recognition, and in such a way
that this is compatible with the other goods he recognizes as fundamental interests—life, freedom, property, and personal security—also being
secured for each. In order to see how this task figures implicitly in The
Social Contract, it is necessary to focus on amour propre’s comparative
nature and on the fact that a comparative standing does not have to be a
superior one. If what my amour propre leads me to seek is the respect
I deserve as a human being—a respect I am willing to grant to others
in return—then the standing I seek is comparative but not superior;
equal standing is still comparative standing.25 This means that a wellordered state can go a long way toward satisfying its members’ needs for
25. Joshua Cohen, Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 101–4.
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recognition by creating political institutions that guarantee citizens
equal respect, which in turn affects the self-conceptions of those who
grow up in such a society, including the ways they seek to satisfy their
generic need for recognition. It is easy to see, then, how the legitimate
republic accommodates citizens’ fundamental interest in finding recognition, for the core ideal of its principle of legitimacy is the moral equality
of all, as embodied, for example, in the ideal of equality before the law. In
realizing this ideal in a variety of ways,26 the legitimate republic provides
a stable source of public recognition of (one significant dimension of )
the worth of all individuals.
These political measures, however, cannot exhaust Rousseau’s
response to the threats posed by inflamed amour propre to the wellbeing of all, precisely because equal political respect cannot fully satisfy
individuals’ legitimate desires to be valued by others.27 Even in a society
where the political ideal of equal citizenship were perfectly realized,
there would remain room in other social spheres for inflamed desires for
superiority to take hold of social members and produce the pathologies
of recognition discussed above that make the universal satisfaction of
amour propre impossible. To the extent that economic inequalities built
into the basic structure of these social spheres generate inflamed desires for
recognition, a political philosophy committed to securing the fundamental interests of all its members must be concerned with regulating those
inequalities. The task of the social contract cannot be accomplished
without paying attention to the ways in which nonpolitical institutions
shape the recognitive aspirations of their members, and reducing the
possibilities for inequalities in wealth plays a significant role in carrying
out this task.
III. ROUSSEAU’S CRITIQUE IN RELATION TO CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS
In the remainder of this article I attempt to situate Rousseau’s critique of
inequality in relation to treatments of the same topic in liberal political
theory today, with the aim of asking whether Rousseau has anything
distinctive to contribute to the contemporary debate. For reasons of
26. In addition to equality before the law, citizens enjoy the same negative freedoms;
they have the same rights to political participation; and laws count as legitimate only if they
safeguard the fundamental interests of each.
27. Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love, pp. 67–70.
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space I limit myself to discussing Rawls, the most prominent of contemporary Rousseaueans.28 I begin with the part of Rousseau’s view just
articulated, the idea that limiting inequalities in wealth might be part of
a strategy for preventing desires for recognition generated within society
from becoming inflamed in ways that guarantee frustration. That this
proposal bears similarities to Rawls’s view comes to light in his singling
out of “the social bases of self-respect” ( JF, 60)29 as “perhaps the most
important” (TJ, 440) of the primary goods that just institutions must
distribute fairly. Both thinkers agree, then, that securing the social conditions of satisfying recognition for all is a principal task of the just
state.30 In fact, Rawls seems to have incorporated Rousseau’s reflections
on the relation between economic equality and the satisfaction of amour
propre to such a degree that it is difficult to find a fundamental difference
between them on this score. For after showing how certain basic features
of a just society—private property (JF, 114), private associations (TJ, 440),
equal rights of citizenship and liberty (TJ, 536)—help to establish the
social bases of self-respect for all, Rawls goes on to allow that applying
the difference principle might require reducing the gap in wealth
between society’s extremes solely for the purpose of preventing the rise
of inflamed passions—most prominently, envy—that, when recognized
status is linked to relative wealth, generate the very pathologies of recognition highlighted in the Second Discourse (TJ, 546). While there may
be subtle differences between the two views on this issue, the degree to
which they overlap far outweighs their disagreement.
For this reason I will focus instead on the more complicated issue of
limiting economic inequality for the purpose of securing freedom—the
absence of domination—for all social members.31 While at first glance
28. Others include Elizabeth Anderson, Joshua Cohen, and Samuel Scheffler.
29. References to works of John Rawls use the following abbreviations and are cited
parenthetically: JF: Justice as Fairness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001);
PL: Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); TJ: A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
30. Rawls includes recognition—“finding our person and deeds appreciated and confirmed by others”—among the circumstances that support self-respect (TJ, 440).
31. This is also a concern of Pettit’s version of republicanism. Whereas traditional
republicanism believed little could be done to reduce the material bases of domination
by decreasing inequalities in wealth or economic status, his view requires the state to
undertake substantive redistributive measures when they are necessary to foster the economic independence of every citizen (Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 158–63). For Pettit, such
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there seem to be clear differences between the views of Rawls and
Rousseau with respect to both specific policy recommendations and
fundamental principles—Rawls, for example, does not place material
dependence and domination, or the connection between them, at the
center of his theory—the differences turn out to be much smaller once
the entirety of Rawls’s elaborate position is taken into account. If
Rousseau’s principal reason for limiting economic inequality is to eliminate domination, Rawls’s principal reason seems to lie elsewhere, in a
consideration that plays no role for Rousseau. If we think of the difference principle as Rawls’s main response to the problem of economic
inequality, this contrast comes into view. For the point of the difference
principle is not to eliminate the conditions of domination (or to promote
freedom in some other way) but to ensure a fair distribution of the
benefits of social cooperation. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance that the idea of society as a system of mutually advantageous
cooperation plays in Rawls’s theory of justice, and this idea is especially
prominent in his justification of the difference principle: if cooperation is a win-win situation, producing greater social wealth than
noncooperating individuals would produce on their own, then the
question arises as to how the advantages of cooperation are to be divided
fairly among those who participate in society’s cooperative scheme.
(Rousseau and Rawls agree that having this distribution determined by
the free market does not ensure its being just.) This means that the
question addressed by the difference principle would arise for Rawls
even in a society where poverty and domination were eliminated. The
point of the principle is not to lift the poor out of poverty or to make them
free but to ensure that the less well off (regardless of how well off they are
absolutely) receive a fair share of the advantages of the cooperative
scheme in which they participate.
Focusing only on the difference principle might suggest that Rawls
and Rousseau also disagree on the degree of economic inequality permissible in a just society since, as many have pointed out, the difference
measures consist primarily in welfare aid designed to ensure that all individuals have
the basic capabilities needed to function “normally and properly” within society
(p. 158). More radical transformations that address asymmetries in the economic
structure of society, though not ruled out, play little role in his reflections on the policy
implications of republicanism.
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principle is capable of justifying very large disparities in wealth, whereas
Rousseau believed that even modest inequalities tended to produce
domination. This is where Rawls’s position becomes complex. His
view is that while considerations about a fair distribution of the advantages of cooperation, taken by themselves, do not rule out large inequalities, a theory of justice has other reasons for limiting inequalities in
wealth, and once these reasons are taken into account, the range of
permissible inequality is greatly reduced, perhaps even to a level that
would satisfy Rousseau. This claim is confirmed by the argument
Rawls develops toward the end of his career that only alternatives
to capitalism—property-owning democracy but not welfare-state or
laissez-faire capitalism—are consistent with justice ( JF, 135–36).
Property-owning democracy is an “alternative to capitalism” because it
ensures “widespread ownership of productive assets,” thereby obliterating (or reducing) the class distinctions (JF, 139) on which capitalism
depends. Whatever property-owning democracy might look like when
fleshed out in more detail than Rawls provides, it is surely not remote
from the kind of society Rousseau, if writing in the twentieth century,
might have endorsed.
The more philosophical question is whether Rawls’s reasons for
endorsing property-owning democracy are similar to Rousseau’s. There
are grounds for thinking they are not. For the main reason Rawls limits
economic inequality beyond what the difference principle requires is to
create the conditions under which the fair value of equal political liberties and fair equality of opportunity can be realized.32 In neither of these
arguments does the avoidance of domination appear to play a central
role, but in fact the issue of domination creeps into both. I begin with fair
equality of opportunity. As with the difference principle, Rawls’s main
reason for worrying about equality of opportunity has to do not with
avoiding domination but with ensuring fairness, in this case fairness in
competition for public offices and social positions. To the extent that
measures for limiting economic inequality are necessary in order to
ensure that those “similarly motivated and endowed” have “the same
32. I am indebted to Erin Kelly for this point. For more on a Rawlsian critique
of economic inequality, see Kelly, “Inequality, Difference, and Prospects for
Democracy,” in The Blackwell Companion to Rawls, ed. Jon Mandle and David Reidy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2013).
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prospects of . . . achievement” regardless of the social class they are
born into, those measures are required by the principle of fair equality
of opportunity (JF, 44).
Fairness of opportunity is not the same as freedom from domination,
but the two ideals are more closely linked than they first seem to be. It is
noteworthy that Rawls sometimes articulates the purpose of measures
dictated by the principle of fair equality of opportunity in terms of avoiding domination: in articulating the implications of this principle, Rawls
pleads for institutions that “adjust the long-term trend of economic
forces so as to prevent excessive concentrations of . . . wealth, especially
those likely to lead to political domination” ( JF, 44). This certainly
sounds like a version of Rousseau’s principle—limit economic inequality
to the extent necessary to avoid domination—but it is worth asking how
precisely inequality of opportunity is related to domination here. As
Rawls says, what is at issue is political domination, and his thought must
be that large inequalities of wealth adversely affect the chances of the less
well off to attain the public offices through which citizens make and
execute laws. This counts as a form of domination because when one
group has a long-term advantage in determining laws that another group
must obey, the former succeed in getting themselves obeyed by the
latter. Yet even though part of the reason Rawls endorses fair equality of
opportunity seems to be because it prevents a kind of domination, there
is an important conceptual distinction between aiming to achieve fairness (of opportunity) and aiming to eliminate domination. In other
words, Rawls’s reflections on fair equality of opportunity give us two
(converging but still separate) reasons for limiting inequalities in wealth:
doing so is a condition of achieving fairness in the opportunities citizens
have available to them, but it also prevents a type of domination, where
one group regularly succeeds in getting its will, expressed in laws,
obeyed by another.33
Does the point I am attributing to Rousseau imply a substantive critique of Rawls? I doubt that it does at the level of institutional arrangements. And with respect to philosophical commitments, it seems
33. This is essentially Thomas Scanlon’s point when he distinguishes, as reasons
for pursuing equality, between ensuring the fairness of distributive processes and
ensuring that some do not have “an unacceptable degree of control over the lives of
others”: Scanlon, The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), pp. 205–6.
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implausible to claim that Rawls’s emphasis on fairness means that his
theory is unconcerned with the problem of domination. At most,
Rousseau’s point invites us to reflect further than Rawls himself did on
the relation between fairness and freedom (the absence of domination).
For example: is it possible for fairness and freedom (in this sense) to
generate conflicting rather than converging requirements, and if so,
which of the two has priority? And, even if fairness and freedom are
conceptually distinct, does aiming at perfect fairness (in matters concerning economic inequality) automatically remedy the problem of
domination, without our needing to worry about what additional measures might be necessary to ensure that social members avoid the conditions of inequality that make domination virtually inescapable?
I now turn to the second set of reasons Rawls has for limiting economic inequality beyond what the difference principle requires, those
deriving from realizing the fair value of equal political liberties. Here
economic inequality is clearly brought into relation with freedom—
some liberties remain “merely formal” unless a certain degree of economic equality34 provides citizens with the means they need to exercise
their rights more or less equally and thereby realize the “fair value” of
those rights—but the question is whether this part of Rawls’s view
addresses the threat that Rousseau sees economic inequality as posing to
freedom, understood as the absence of domination. Interestingly, the
answer to this question is precisely the one we encountered in discussing
fair equality of opportunity: ensuring the fair value of equal political
liberties—it is only political liberties whose fair value is ensured ( JF, 44,
148)—is also aimed at eliminating domination in the political sphere.
As Rawls puts the point: “the fair value of the political liberties ensures
that citizens . . . have roughly an equal chance of influencing the government’s policy . . . irrespective of their economic . . . class” ( JF, 46). Thus,
as Rawls admits, guaranteeing the fair value of political liberties comes
down in the end to guaranteeing a specific kind of equality of opportunity, namely, the opportunity to attain positions of political authority
and to influence legislation ( JF, 149). Both principles, then, though primarily intended to achieve a kind of fairness (of opportunity), also work
to reduce the likelihood of a kind of domination (political domination).
34. At issue here is relative, not merely absolute, wealth since exercising one’s political
liberties involves competing with others for political influence ( JF, 46).
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Hence, when thought through from the perspective of Rousseau’s
reflections on inequality and domination, Rawls’s positions on fair
equality of opportunity and the fair value of equal political liberties agree
in giving us two reasons for limiting economic inequality: fairness (of
opportunity) and the avoidance of domination. If there is a philosophical
critique to be made of Rawls from Rousseau’s perspective, it is suggested
by the fact that both principles are directed against specifically political
forms of domination. Political domination is a genuine concern of
Rousseau’s; it is criticized in his treatment of the specious social contract, and it is what he is worried about when he disallows factions within
the assembly, where the opinions of one group as to what should be law
consistently win out over others’, resulting in the latter regularly obeying
the former. Yet political domination is not the only kind of domination
that alarms him: domination arises in the Second Discourse before
political society is established (DI, 167/OC 3, 171), and pointing out the
threat of nonpolitical domination—where it is not law that compels us to
obey others but simply the combination of dependence and economic
inequality—is one of that text’s main goals. As Smith points out, as long
as the relationship between workers and employers is characterized by
fundamental inequality, there will be a systematic tendency, grounded
in the economic structure of society, for domination to arise. But the
domination Smith draws our attention to is not political; his complaint is
not that workers are subject to laws made only by employers and their
representatives (though this, too, is likely to be the case); rather, it is that
one group of individuals finds itself in a position in which, constrained
by the mix of dependence and inequality, it must regularly follow the
dictates of another group, with respect to wages and laboring conditions,
if it is to be able to satisfy its material needs. The site of this domination
is not the legislative assembly but everyday economic life, where everything from the number of bathroom breaks to policies for hiring and
firing workers is dictated by those who occupy the advantaged position
of the unequal relationship.35
35. One might extend Rousseau’s point to a sphere where he didn’t envisage it being
applied, the family. While it would be wrong to locate the entire source of gendered domination in the family in economic inequalities between husband and wife, it seems clear
that inequalities, in control of the family’s wealth as well as in earning power, are part of the
source of that domination and that equalizing the economic positions of women and men
could reduce it.
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Finally, it is unclear whether even this point—that a theory of justice
should worry as much about domination in the economic sphere as it
does about political domination—is one that Rawls completely overlooks or that his theory could not accommodate.36 His sparing description of property-owning democracy makes it difficult to know for sure,
but he does say that property-owning democracy “disperse[s] ownership of wealth . . . to prevent a small part of society from controlling the
economy” and that it aims to “put all citizens in a position to manage
their own affairs on a footing of a suitable degree of social and economic equality” (JF, 139). Also relevant is his claim that “excess market
power must be prevented and fair bargaining power should obtain
between employers and employees” (PL, 267). Yet the scattered nature
of these remarks raises the same question mentioned above concerning
the relation between the values of fairness and freedom (as the absence
of economic domination) and how precisely freedom in this sense fits
in with the main values Rawls appeals to when defining primary goods,
determining basic liberties, and arguing for the fair equality of opportunity, namely, the exercise of the moral powers essential to us as free
and equal citizens ( JF, 45). The beginning of a Rawlsian answer to this
question is surely that avoiding domination in the economic sphere is
essential if individuals are to be able fully to pursue their own conceptions of the good. At the very least, however, the distinction between
these two types of domination—and the importance of nonpolitical
forms—is undertheorized by Rawls, even if incorporating Rousseau’s
insights on this topic might not in the end put much strain on the
complex edifice that his theory of justice, taken in its entirety, turns
out to be.
IV. CONCLUDING RESERVATIONS
I end my reconstruction of Rousseau’s critique of inequality with two
reservations. The first is that inequality is probably too coarse a concept
to pick out the specific economic features of society that produce the ills
36. Samuel Scheffler emphasizes that equality is both a political and a social ideal
for Rawls, suggesting that nonpolitical forms of domination worry him as much as
political forms: Scheffler, Equality and Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
pp. 191, 199, 225.
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Rousseau is worried about. Questions raised above about the indeterminacy of his criteria for freedom-endangering inequality should lead us to
wonder whether inequality, defined purely quantitatively, is too indefinite to distinguish conditions that pose substantial threats to freedom
from those that are unlikely to result in domination. Indeed, Smith’s
example suggests that Rousseau’s point might be better formulated by
focusing on specific types of economic inequality that track not merely
quantitative differences but more consequential structural features of
economic life. Rousseau’s account should encourage us to ask: which
types of inequalities tend to produce asymmetric relations of dependence with respect to needs of such urgency that the disadvantaged are
likely to judge that they have no choice but to obey the wills of those they
depend on in order to satisfy those needs? Smith’s example, grounded in
his keen sense for how capitalism relies on class differences—defined
not quantitatively but by the different economic functions (based on
different relations to the means of production) that the classes in question perform—exemplifies one powerful way of refining the concept of
inequality to make it more useful for political theory.
My second reservation, too, pushes Rousseau in the direction of
Marx. Even if loss of freedom in economic life remains a phenomenon
political theory should address, we should ask whether domination, as
Rousseau defines it, picks out the most important ill of modern economies. Rousseau’s emphasis on obedience is understandable, given that
he presupposes a picture of economic life importantly different from
contemporary, and even nineteenth-century, economic reality. His
picture of society bears traces of a feudal, or at least premodern, world
where capitalist relations, mediated by an impersonal market, have not
yet fully developed. For this reason Rousseau’s critique runs the risk
of missing some instances of illegitimate asymmetries in social power
that are more prominent today than domination, construed strictly in
terms of obedience.
The suggestion here is that many instances of asymmetries in social
power in capitalist societies do not involve relations among wills in the
sense that one party obeys the commands of another. This is precisely
the thought that leads Weber—influenced by Marx’s account of power
relations among classes in capitalism—to distinguish domination
(asymmetric relations of obedience) from social power more generally
and to regard domination as merely one form that asymmetries in social
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power can assume.37 Using Weber’s terminology, we can say that the
most common ways capitalists assert power over workers do not involve
the latter obeying the commands of the former. With respect to determining the basic terms according to which the “advantages of social
cooperation” are to be distributed, the free market, together with the
basic inequality in the economic positions of the classes, ensures that a
property-owning class will be able to assert its will—to get much more of
what it wants—in relation to a property-less class without needing to
issue commands that the property-less obey. In capitalist economies
there is, one might say, a clash of wills—a clash of interests—that is
regularly decided in favor of one party, without those wills ever coming
into direct contact and without any will issuing commands to another.
(Interestingly, though, economic globalization has produced a situation
where domination in Rousseau’s sense is a major form of oppression
among countries: organizations such as the International Monetary
Fund, controlled by and advancing the interests of rich nations, dictate
the internal policies of poorer, asymmetrically dependent nations.) If
Rousseau’s critique of economic inequality is to capture important ways
that asymmetries of social power manifest themselves in the contemporary world, his narrow focus on relations of obedience needs to be
supplemented so as to include ways in which, within the “free” market,
the wills of the advantaged determine the actions of the disadvantaged
without commands being issued or obeyed.
In this article I have argued for five points:
(1) Rousseau draws our attention to one specific kind of illegitimate
social power, domination (regularly obeying a foreign will), as
well as to its source in economic inequality. Both of these issues,
though not completely absent in liberal political theories, tend to
be undertheorized by them.
(2) Locating the source of domination in asymmetric relations of
dependence enables us to see how there can be widespread
domination in the absence of coercion and in the presence of
actual consent (when the motivation for obedience is to secure
the cooperation one requires in order to satisfy one’s needs).
Domination includes much more than being coerced to obey.
37. Weber, Economy and Society, 1:53.
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(3) Rousseau shows that domination often extends beyond the
political realm, where some have more say than others in
determining laws, infecting other social spheres as well,
especially the economy (but also, if we extrapolate from his
account, the family).
(4) Rousseau argues convincingly that economic inequality, especially class inequality, generates domination among interdependent individuals and that a just social order strives to eradicate
the material conditions of domination, preventing the systematic
domination of any individual or group.
(5) Rousseau’s theory would be defective if it implied that domination were the only form of illegitimate social power that economic inequality made possible. Other forms are closely related
to domination insofar as they involve the wills of one class regularly winning out over those of another in market competition,
but without anyone issuing commands obeyed by others.